I am flabbergasted – one of my poems has now reached the short list for the Fish Poetry prize. This is startling news and I have to keep pinching myself. Just to reach the last 20 something poems out of thirteen hundred seems too good to be true.

And yet, I still have not fully mastered basic tools such as trochaic feet…though I think I now have the measure of iambs. My difficulty seems to be that when I read something out loud, I manage to subtly manipulate what I have written to make it fit.

I tried the One Stop Poetry prosody exercise set by Gay Cannon this week and managed a halfway satisfactory first draft (see my post ‘Minor Key’) , but could I tell if I had utilised trochees…could I heck!

Gay very kindly pointed out where I had and where I hadn’t and kindly said that what I had written worked because of the subject matter. I thank her for her generosity, however, I know that I still can’t reliably count this skill as one of my poetic tools…yet. And so I accept that I have much to work on.

Thanks to the One Stop Poetry site for continually stretching my expertise and for coming up with such challenging and inspiring prompts and exercises.

2 Responses to Holding my breath!

rules, damn rules and poetry – what makes you such a good poet is that you don’t HAVE to abide by the rules – you can use them as a framework and then smash them to bits if it gives the result – top 20 eh – fantastic – I predict ‘trouble’ of the sort it is nice to have following shortly…..